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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott McPealy who wrote (10618)	7/22/1998 8:32:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

McPealy, You need to read the news, boy. SUNW is already red hot on INTC hardware. They'll make money selling Sparc systems AND selling Solaris on Intel. INTC, for it's part, is now moving closer & closer to the SUNW camp, because it has had some bad luck of its own with PC sales going in the tank. Two bad quarters in a row & the CEO replaced means INTC is looking for alternatives. SUNW will provide INTC with the ONLY viable 64-bit OS to run on Merced, when (if) it first arrives on the market. INTC signed w/SUNW because they got tired of waiting for Lew Platt to deliver on his promises, and they aren't even seriously considering MSFT's NT (now changed from NotThere to NoThreat) for Merced. Hey, they gotta make money too!! Who are they gonna go to for high margin servers, MSFT??? No, they're praising SUNW up & down for Solaris' fab benchmarks on Xeon. Unlike all the PC hardware vendors around, MSFT can't "leverage" Intel. INTC needs good software to sell their systems & MSFT can't cut it in the enterprise, where all the money is for them. They can still make money selling cheap PC's, but only if the volume is there. Right now their gross margin on a Pentiums is around $600/unit, and for the Celerons (& older MMX's) its around $20/unit. Look for INTC & SUNW to keep the dialog alive & work together in the future. It's going to take time for this to sink in for a lot of people: SUNW is more than a hardware & OS vendor. They are moving into software & solutions at worp-speed and thus will make BIG money selling SPARC systems AND selling applications, consulting, and service. McNealy's strategy to saw the PC market in half with the NC is brilliant! Disk drive maker Quantum wouldn't even talk to SUNW before the sub-$1000 pc & now they're a PRIME licensee for Jini. BTW, SUNW is porting Linux to SPARC.

To: Scott McPealy who wrote (10618)	7/22/1998 8:56:00 PM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

The smartest thing that Sun could do right now would be to REALLY get behind Solaris/X86. Get it out there at a CHEAP price. In fact, maybe they should GIVE IT AWAY, along with the development tools. This would be the ultimate bold give-away - giving away an OS and the tools to run on a processor that the company doesn't even make. I think it would be crazy like a fox. Sun makes it's money in the high-end server market. They ARE going to lose some of the low-end business to Linux/Intel - that is a fact. Who cares, though? It is a low-margin business. Why not capture future high-end customers while "giving away the store"? I've run Solaris/X86. It was several years ago, and I judged it to be very good. Oh, bitheads will tell you that Linux is much faster. But what I liked is that it was VERY close, both operationally and in terms of software development, to Solaris/Sparc. One can move back and forth very easily between the two environments. I say, hook em' on Solaris on the low-end machines, and when applications grow to the point where they need a powerful server that can't be accomidated with an X86 machine, they will easily move into Sun hardware. Otherwise, people ARE going to gravitate to Linux/PC. When they outgrow that, they will either undergo a painful conversion process to Solaris/Sparc, cursing both Linux and Solaris along the way, or they will just muddle along with Linux/PC until bigger PC servers come along. FREE SOLARIS NOW! FREE SOLARIS NOW! ;)

To: Scott McPealy who wrote (10618)	7/23/1998 8:10:00 AM
From: Chung Yang	Respond to of 64865

>>> Actually Sun is just another proprietary vendor and McNealy is trying to match every move made by Microsoft. Sun's allies (Netscape and Oracle) are already moving towards Linux + Intel. The reality is that the market sees Intel hardware as open and cheap, Sun hardware as proprietary and expensive. <<< You might want to check the prices again on SUN hardwares. Sun machines from very low end to the very high end are very competitive. The price/performance actually gets better relative to competitors in the same class when you get to the very high end. The latest low end SUN machines are made with off the shelf components just like a PC. With embedded PCI controller and other system controllers on the chip means lower production cost. Low-end sun machines ranges from $2500 - $4000 list. It will likely be lower in the future. As they migrate to using all PC components .. except microprocessor of course. - Chung